11/08/2024
By Jacob LaMountain
Candidate name: Jacob LaMountain
Degree: Master of Science
Defense Date: Thursday, November 21
Time: 9 a.m.
Location: Olney Hall, Room 136 (Department of Physics conference room) and on Zoom
Title: Spatiotemporal Compression and Light Extraction in the Mid-IR With Photonic Funnels
Committee:
- Advisor Viktor Podolskiy, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Physics and Applied Physics, University of Massachusetts Lowell
- Timothy Cook, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Physics and Applied Physics, University of Massachusetts Lowell
- Archana Kamal, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Northwestern University
- Hugo Ribeiro, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Physics and Applied Physics, University of Massachusetts Lowell
Abstract: In conventional homogeneous and isotropic materials light propagation is constrained by the diffraction limit, which prevents its confinement in volumes with dimensions below about half a wavelength. However, many objects of interest which absorb and emit light are much smaller than the wavelength of light. This scale mismatch only becomes more pronounced as the wavelength of light increases. While nanophotonics is well-developed in the visible and near-infrared parts of the spectrum, there is no straightforward way to extend this success to the mid-infrared: an important region for sensing, thermal imaging, and spectroscopy. Photonic funnels---microscale variable-radius waveguides with hyperbolic metamaterial cores---have been shown to efficiently couple diffraction-limited light to and from the nanoscale. In this thesis the ability of photonic funnels to confine and extract light is evaluated with numerical simulations and understood through analytical studies of related hyperbolic metamaterial structures of simpler geometries.